February 10, 2006

Little Theater, Quad 346, SJU4:15-5:15pm

Claire Haeg, Political Science

Crackpots in the Commonwealth: Neo-populists Party emergence in Austrialia, Candada, and New Zealand

Extremist anti-immigrant “neo-populist” parties, such as Le Pen’s Front Nationale in France, have been a fairly consistent feature of Western European politics since WWII, but they have not usually been found in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the 1990s, however, all three of these countries saw the rise of fairly virulent xenophobic political parties. This talk will discuss the reasons behind the rise of anti-immigrant politics in these three advanced industrial democracies, and what lessons can be learned from them.